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Ian Williams the Controversy Involving the English Chancery in 1616 Is

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Ian Williams the Controversy Involving the English Chancery in 1616 Is DEVELOPING A PREROGATIVE THEORY FOR THE AUTHORITY OF THE CHANCERY: THE FRENCH CONNECTION Ian Williams The controversy involving the English Chancery in 1616 is well-known.1 A conflict over Chancery intervening after judgment at law led to debates about the propriety Lecturer, Faculty of Laws, UCL. My thanks to Adolfo Giuliani, my LLM seminar group in the Historical Development of the Common Law and participants in the 2013 British Legal History Conference for their assistance and comments. I have used the following abbreviations: BL MS Add (British Library Additional Manuscript); BL MS Egerton (British Library Egerton Manuscript); BL MS Harg (British Library Hargrave Manuscript); BL MS Harl (British Library Harley Manuscript). References to William Lambarde’s Archeion are to C. H. McIlwain and P. L. Ward (eds.), Archeion or, a Discourse upon the High Courts of Justice in England by William Lambarde (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1957). Quotations from Bodin’s République are taken from K. D. McRae (ed.), The Six Bookes of a Commonweal (New York: Arno Press, 1979). This version of the text is the 1606 translation of the République by Richard Knolles, based on both the original French (1576) and the 1586 Latin text, which were substantially different (see McRae ‘Introduction’ in Bodin, Six Bookes, pp. A28-A38). I have compared the Knolles text to the third French printing of 1578 (J. Bodin, Les Six Livres de la Republique (Paris: Jacques du Puy, 1578)). Passages where the English translation arguably diverges from the French are noted in the footnotes, but do not affect the argument presented here. 1 J. P. Dawson, ‘Coke and Ellesmere Disinterred: The Attack on the Chancery in 1616’ (1941-2) 36 Illinois Law Review 127; J. H. Baker, ‘The Common Lawyers and the Chancery: 1616’ (1969) 4 Irish Jurist 368; L. A. Knafla, Law and Politics in Jacobean England (1977, Cambridge University Press), pp. 155-181. 1 and legality of equitable intervention. Ultimately the king supported the Chancery and Edward Coke was dismissed as Chief Justice of the King’s Bench. There are two main strands which are identified in historical discussion of the dispute. The first concerns the relationship between law and equity and the supremacy of equity.2 The second regards the dispute as part of a conflict concerning the “prerogative” courts, reflective of common law opposition to the arbitrary prerogative.3 This paper considers why the authority of the Chancery was considered to be found in the royal prerogative.4 In doing so, the paper reconsiders Elizabethan and Jacobean sources 2 Eg, Baker, ‘Common Lawyers’. In this paper I use ‘equity’ to describe the Chancery’s jurisdiction which was based on the idea of epieikeia: justice which could not be provided in the regular courts by ordinary course of law. On epieikeia see J.L. Barton, ‘Introduction’ to T. F. T. Plucknett and J. L. Barton (eds.), St German’s Doctor and Student (91 Seld. Soc., 1974), pp. xliv-li. This meaning therefore excludes the ‘equity of the statute’ used by the common law courts in interpreting statutes and Halliday’s recent use of ‘equity’ in relation to the prerogative writs in the common law courts c.1600 (P. Halliday, Habeas Corpus: from England to Empire (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 87-93). 3 Eg J. S. Hart, The Rule of Law 1603-1660: Crown, Courts and Judges (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2003), p. 48. 4 This is not to assume that the idea of a wider conflict between the common law and the prerogative is supported by the sources. For present purposes, it is sufficient to note that people interested in defending the Chancery’s jurisdiction in 1616 clearly did see claims about the prerogative basis of that jurisdiction as important. 2 concerning the Chancery and equity and examines the changing conceptualisation of the prerogative from the late-1570s into the Jacobean period. The argument in this paper is that the association between the Chancery and prerogative is a result of the changing conceptualisation of the prerogative from the late-1570s as well as James I’s accession to the throne. Before the 1570s, common lawyers discussed the royal prerogative as a set of prerogatives: special royal rights in relation to property law. During the reigns of Elizabeth and James this view changed: royal powers generally were the prerogative and to challenge or restrict this prerogative was to undermine the king himself. This view meant that royal intervention to provide justice came to be seen as part of the royal prerogative, and as a consequence the Chancery became intellectually tied to ideas of prerogative. In addition to setting out the evidence of the change, the paper argues that a cause of this change can be identified in the influence of the writings of Jean Bodin. Direct evidence is too limited to demonstrate that Bodin’s influence was the sole cause, but a number of writings about the Chancery demonstrably made use of Bodin, albeit without citation. Bodin’s ideas about sovereignty and the authority of a ruler in relation to equity came to inform views about the authority of the Chancery itself.5 5 The paper therefore also demonstrates the early influence of Bodin on English lawyers. For discussion of the influence of Bodin before the 1606 translation of the République, see G. Mosse, ‘The Influence of Jean Bodin’s République in English Political Thought’ (1948) 5 Medievalia et Humanistica 73. The evidence from Lambarde’s Archeion (see notes 52-72 below), antedates the earliest identified 3 I. EXPLAINING THE AUTHORITY OF THE CHANCERY BEFORE THE LATE-1570S At first sight, links between the Chancery and the royal prerogative seem obvious. Historically the Chancery did emerge from exercises of the royal power to do justice, a power which was accepted as a royal duty.6 However, many discussions of Chancery and equity by lawyers make no reference to any specifically royal power at all. Probably the standard early-modern work on the Chancery, Christopher St German’s Doctor and Student, is entirely silent on the source of the Chancery’s authority, considering only the necessity of equity.7 The same can be said about later works, such as William West’s discussion of equity and the Chancery in influence from Bodin in printed sources (Mosse, ‘Influence’, p. 75) by two years. Citations to Bodin’s Method by English writers on history can be seen from 1575 (see J. D. Alsop, ‘William Fleetwood and Elizabethan Historical Scholarship’ (1994) 25 Sixteenth Century Journal 155, p. 165). 6 See, e.g., W. H. Bryson, ‘Introduction’ to W. H. Bryson (ed.), Cases Concerning Equity and the Courts of Equity 1550-1660 (117 Seld. Soc., 2000), vol. 1, pp. xix-xxii. 7 Plucknett and Barton, St German’s Doctor and Student. This is not to say that the link between the king and equity was not made by others before the reign of Elizabeth, but that legal discussion of the Chancery did not mention the monarch’s role. For a seemingly non-legal reference to the prince providing epieikeia in the fifteenth century, see A. Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 7. 4 Symbolaeography.8 If the prerogative has a role in these theories, it is not a role which is ever explained, nor is it a necessary role – the authority of the Chancery was dependent upon the need for equity, not the power of the monarch. Earlier debates about the jurisdiction of the Chancery to issue injunctions after common law judgment do not seem to have raised the issue of the link between the Chancery and the prerogative.9 8 W. West, The second part of Symboleography, newly corrected and amended, and very much enlarged in all the foure seuerall treatises (London: Thomas Wight, 1601), ff. 173v-177. West’s discussion of equity used Hermann Vulteius’ Jurisprudentia Romana (1590) (see M. R. T. Macnair, The Law of Proof in Early- Modern Equity (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1999), p. 44. 9 See J. H. Baker, The Oxford History of the Laws of England, vol. VI, 1483-1558 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 174-5 for the Henrician period. The surviving material concerning Finch v. Throgmorton (1598), which raised the same legal issue as the 1616 controversy, does not refer to the prerogative, although all but one of the surviving law reports were either written by Coke (E. Coke, The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England (London: M. Flesher, 1644), p. 124; E. Coke, The Fourth Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England (London: M. Flesher, 1644), p. 86) or report Coke’s references to Finch v. Throgmorton in later cases (3 Buls. 118; Cro. Jac. 344). Coke’s own report of Finch v. Throgmorton (BL MS Harl. 6686, ff. 222v-227) does not mention the prerogative. The one report not associated with Coke (W. H. Bryson (ed.), Cases Concerning Equity and the Courts of Equity 1550-1660 (118 Seld. Soc., 2001), vol. 2, p. 441) does not mention the prerogative. Two tracts in relation to the 1598 debate do not link the Chancery and the prerogative (Henry E. Huntington Library Ellesmere Manuscripts 2920 (supporting the King’s Bench) and 2986 (supporting the Chancery)). Aside from one of these tracts, the material surviving about Finch v. Throgmorton favours the common law courts, whose supporters never refer to prerogative issues. 5 Nevertheless, legal historians have linked the emergence of the jurisdiction of the Chancery with the prerogative.10 The evidence of such a link is very limited, especially in terms of influencing the debates about the Chancery jurisdiction after 1600, which is when the association with the prerogative was explicit.
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